Byte Arcane making Sigil of Kings @byte-arcane.itch.io

New introduction post I guess! 🦋

Hi! I'm a tech artist doing some hobby dev in my spare time. I like to work on lo-fi graphics, proc gen, and horror-adjacent stuff.

Here's a selection of cool projects I've done in the last few years. You can play some of them at lunar-finch.itch.io!

20.10.2024 14:42 — 👍 23 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 1

Dialogue, Quests, Refactor | Sigil of Kings For the last few weeks I've been working mainly on dialogue and quests, as it's definitely a tricky one to solve, for procedurally generated quests. Dialogue - supporting shared dynamic topics In a previous quest scenario, we have a mine overrun by fire elementals. The quest giver (e.g. nearby village chief) gets some text, but everybody else, miners included, don't seem to care/know about it! So let's fix that. The simplest approach is to edit the dialogue tree and add some relevant mines to entities of interest. But it's extremely important that this is lazily evaluated, as imagine for example the following scenario: We have the main quest being completed, say the world is saved, and everybody celebrates in some way. "Everybody" might mean ten thousand entities. Do we go and edit each one when we decide on the dialogue? No. We use a shared dynamic conversation topic with an associated entity filter, which basically dictates if an entity is able to chat about that topic. We go through a global list of these topic/filter pairs each time we start a conversation, to see what needs adding (or removing) to the conversation topics. That's about it! Implementation-wise things get a bit more complicated with several corner cases. For example, sometimes, this "quest is over, thanks pal!" message should appear only once, instead of repeatedly. Also, we should be able to remove the entity filter and topic after a while, for keeping the list of dynamic topics under control. Currently this is done by assigning a timeout (e.g. 1 game year), after which people "forget" to make such comments as life goes back to normal. Dialogue tool At some point I need to write more dialogues. At the moment, the dialogue tree structure is of course some complicated json format, that supports a number of things like exiting conversations, jumping back to previous topics, show topics conditionally, execute actions with certain choices, etc etc. But of course, some times, or as a starting point, we just want to write a simple dialogue! And very importantly, to visualise it. For any sort of tree visualisation, I usually gravitate towards graphviz dot, as it does the job with nice simple text input. I did write a bunch of prototype tools to edit dialogues, but in the end I reverted to an in-game Dear ImGui-powered tool, added to the arsenal of other such tools. The extra interesting bit there is that I can quickly generate and visualize a dialogue tree, but editing the tree is still painful, so that might need work at some point. Questing A few bits of work here. First of all, some debug console commands for quest or objective progression and completion (successful or not). Pretty sensible and essential really for any non-trivial quest. Some other work involved fixing a bug related to when a quest reward was given, e.g. for the mine scenario I need to add an objective e.g. "Return to the Village Chief" which becomes successful when we interact with the village chief, at which point the reward is provided (e.g. treasure, gold, XP, etc) Game Log The more I look at other game GUIs, the more I realize how huge my fonts are for a lot of cases. I targetted the game log this time, made it smaller and added some alpha grading for older entries. The reason I ended up working on that was because I wanted to show information in the log for items received or lost, e.g. when completing the quest and the player receives the items, there should be some indicator that this happened. WIP: items of ability execution This is a tricky one, as it's work in progress and required quite a bit of refactoring. The game will contain magic scrolls as items, where the scroll will allow you to execute an ability once, at a specified level. Now there are a couple of issues: executing an ability to a given level required a little bit of refactoring, and the other problem is that using the scroll is an ability by itself, so in the middle of an ability execution we need to schedule another ability to happen immediately after. It's not too terrible in theory, but I'm still in the middle of this. The end result of this is that we can have potions, scrolls and wands being able to execute different abilities at fixed levels, so we can have something like a Greater Potion of Blur which would cast a "blur" spell at a fixed high level, that improves evasion. That's all for now, have a nice weekend!

New belated devlog! #gamedev #indiedev #godotengine

byte-arcane.github.i...

08.08.2025 16:06 — 👍 12 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

Spring Tales is a 2D puzzle-adventure game that turns everyday chores into small, cozy challenges with a wholesome story.🌻

#indiegame #indiedev #cozygames #gamedevs #cozy #GameTrailer #TrailerTuesday

20.05.2025 20:18 — 👍 26 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 2

Colorized and Battle-Ready 💪

#scaledeep #warrior #roguelike #turnbased #indiegame #conceptart #gamedev #dungeoncrawler #gameart #conceptart

18.07.2025 14:40 — 👍 16 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0

A new addition to the arsenal of fancy items: the Scroll of Random Teleport! Fun fact: it's not 100% safe, you may become decoration in the wall.

#roguelike #turnbased #scaledeep #indiegame #gaming #indiedev #gamedev

19.07.2025 07:18 — 👍 22 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 0

Refactoring under the coconut palms | Sigil of Kings Alas, holidays are over, and now slowly getting back to reality, playing catchup with work, gamedev and post-holiday photo post-processing. Of course, I didn't manage to keep out of gamedev the entire time, and I ended up sneaking in some refactoring work on a few things that bothered me a lot. It's all about ... Items I had a bunch of classes for specifying item lists for various purposes, e.g. for chests, for starting equipment, other containers etc. Organic code growth had resulted in a few classes, doing similar work, duplicating some code and not even covering all use-cases that eventually surface. This is now changed. There is an ItemProvider class that can be specialised to provide items either explicitly (e.g. by Id), or using filters (e.g. pick a random item of type X), or using more complicated filters, based on context. This last bit is important. Context is important when randomly choosing things in a game with loads of procgen. The simple example that I wanted "cold iron ore" to appear as treasure in cold iron mines. How to do that? I suppose there are multiple ways, so my descent into this solution space led me to using context. I can have a specialised item provider particular to ore. When using this provider to generate an ore chunk, we can use the context to identify where we are, which might inform what ore should we use. My current simple code does "if we're in a mine, choose the ore that corresponds to the mine". This provider can be put in a list of providers for generating contents for a crate in the mine. Another cool (imo) result of this work was the ability to generate items tailored to players, in a classless system, like what I'm using. As a reminder, my system is skill-based: you choose which skills to master, and that defines what you can do, as skills give you passive bonuses and enable abilities. It's somewhat like a mix of latter Might & Magic games (the first person ones) and Elder Scrolls games. So, you finish a quest and get some treasure from the quest giver. Let's say that treasure is a magic piece of equipment. What equipment should it be? Here's when the rng fun begins: each skill has it's own rng-powered item provider, e.g. a dual-wielding skill would be associated with a provider that can generate weapons that can be dual-wielded. Or even a piece of jewelry that can give bonus to that skill. Given the player's skills, we can assign weights to each of these providers based on the skill value to pick a provider, then generate the item using that provider, given the situational context (which is mostly related to where we are). This is not put into practice yet, and some probable kinks into this plan are that some skills don't match well to items. But let's see. Item containers Another bit of complexity here. So, here's part of the conundrum. In a game like Diablo, when you break a barrel or a jug, the contents drop on the floor. There are no generic containers that we can put in and retrieve objects from, except the stash. Of course this is not simulationist, but gamey (these days you also automatically pick up things like gold, because "why would you not"). On the other side of the spectrum we have a game like Skyrim, which opts for the more simulationist approach of interacting with containers to add/remove items. I like both approaches for different reasons. The first approach makes associated gameplay "faster", there's no fussing with containers and the player is not allowed to add/remove items as it would encourage pointless behaviours. The second approach allows for more emergent gameplay, where you can do all sorts of weird things, and manipulating containers for some obscure reason is a part of the game's action vocabulary. Currently I support both approaches. A weapon/armor rack or a jug would use the first approach, whereas a crate, barrel or chest would use the second. Now, we have a few general containers: crate, chest and barrel. How to assign contents? The current approach is to separate container and contents into different presets (containers are object presets, contents are lists of item providers) but also have presets of containers-with-contents... Confused yet? What's the rationale for this level of overengineering? I like contents being presets, because they can be assigned to different containers: "food" as a content preset could be assigned to a villager, a crate, a barrel, a sack, etc. Containers-with-contents are useful when used with the procedural placement system. I can create a preset of "ore crate", which is effectively a crate object with the ore contents preset. This can for example be assigned to procedural placement rules so that I can generate ore crates in a mine level. Natural attacks Through some previous refactoring effort, natural attacks were specified as ... items. Yes, I know, absolute horror. The reason are murky and from organic growth of the code over the years, but it was a clearly terrible state of things that needed changing. The end result is that now natural attacks are declared as "active" abilities, like a spell or other explicit actions that an actor can perform. As such, they have their own requirements (e.g. have nothing equipped if we're using a punch attack), cooldowns (e.g. some special natural attack) etc. Natural attack ammo is still classified as an item, but as a "transient" one, e.g. an acid spit blob. That's all for now, see you next week!

Back from holidays, and for this #screenshotsaturday a text update via the devlog! byte-arcane.github.i...

#gamedev #indiedev #godotengine

19.07.2025 08:28 — 👍 12 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

Gentle reminder that I block accounts that look like this:

Name
X Followers / X,XXX Following
Political Term or Statement in Bio
---
Political Reblog
Political Reblog
Political Reblog
Political Reblog

Replies Tab: Empty

....because that's Bot Behavior 👍

14.07.2025 22:03 — 👍 198 🔁 20 💬 12 📌 1

I even bought game magazines even before buying a computer. And after I bought one, I could not purchase/play most of the games shown/reviewed. But there was a lot of magic in reading about games and looking at screenshots. "One day I'm going to play some of those, and it's going to be so great"

04.07.2025 18:48 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

Sigil of Kings - Art DIY - Steam News Hello everyone! First of all, I've made a variation of the existing trailer (soon to be updated in the Steam page) that includes some additions since the first trailer in the first 8 seconds. Enjoy! Alright, now down to business. Something has happened since the last update. It's small, but important. I decided to start making sprites! Now I'm not the greatest artist in the world (probably closer to the artistic antipode of that) but ...

For this #screenshotsaturday, a Steam News update!
(Also, logging out for a month, see you all in July!)

store.steampowered.c...

#gaming #indiegamedev #godotengine

14.06.2025 11:14 — 👍 13 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

Sigil of Kings - Art DIY - Steam News Hello everyone! First of all, I've made a variation of the existing trailer (soon to be updated in the Steam page) that includes some additions since the first trailer in the first 8 seconds. Enjoy! Alright, now down to business. Something has happened since the last update. It's small, but important. I decided to start making sprites! Now I'm not the greatest artist in the world (probably closer to the artistic antipode of that) but ...

For this #screenshotsaturday, a Steam News update!
(Also, logging out for a month, see you all in July!)

store.steampowered.c...

#gaming #indiegamedev #godotengine

14.06.2025 11:14 — 👍 13 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

Love it, especially those drum beats!

14.06.2025 10:07 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

How about some repair mechanics? There are still a few small missing parts, but overall, it's working! 🔨 (Is this a blacksmith’s hammer?)

#screenshotsaturday #indiegame #games #roguelike #turnbased #rpg #scaledeep #indiedev #gamedev #gaming

14.06.2025 06:43 — 👍 24 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 0

that purple guy is my end-game boss. now that I've added a goal, someone generous might even call this thing a game at this stage. Llofrudd should be almost invincible, but I have no doubt that the roguelike community can figure out a way to kill him #indiedev #gamedev #roguelike

09.06.2025 11:00 — 👍 12 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

The Forgotten Expedition – Dev Diary #6 – vILLAGES! – Kellio Games

Friday means another Dev Diary!

This week I focus on adding a ton of new features with standout being procedurally generated village with 3 different cultures, All in preparation for the NPC update.

kelliogames.com/2025/06/13/t...

#Roguelike #Gaming #ProcGen #IndieGame

13.06.2025 20:49 — 👍 5 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

he will have to get past the bridge guardian
#pixelart #ドット絵 #gamedev #indiedev

13.06.2025 21:11 — 👍 27 🔁 5 💬 3 📌 0

Mines and Sprites | Sigil of Kings A variety of things this week, with very little coding. Mine improvements Minecart tracks. A few bug-fixes in the code to ensure there are no unnecessary loops in the minecart tracks. I did start with an attempt for a grid-specific MST implementation, but kinda gave up on it after a while, as it was taking a few hours plus I was not confident I wanted to have an MST for the minecart tracks. The code is still a bit ad-hoc, but works well enough, so done and over. Miners. Working mines now include miners. The race composition follows the weighted distribution of the city the mine belongs to. Ore. Mines now have lots of ore lying around, and the type of ore is dependent on the type of the mine. Abandoned mines vs working mines. These are now different presets, as abandoned mines include enemies and working mines include miners, as simple as that. A multi-level mine dungeon can of course contain a mix of these. New sprites I had a bit more fun with sprites this week, mostly about inconsequential animals, to add flavour to the world. So now we have penguins (I was super pleased with this one, based on how easy it was), crabs (also super pleased as I had a lot of failed prototypes before) and fire elementals (that's just oryx recoloring). I've also re-shaded the bunny and scaled it down a bit, to make it appear less gigantic. I wanted to do gorillas, but ... it's not working out. 2h failing to draw a bloody gorilla is not fun. I repurposed it to a wererat instead (that's how bad it was) but that was unsatisfactory as well, mainly because of scale issues (looks like a child wererat). So I'm showing you none of these and going back to overworld locations. So far, for mines I've been using the resource icon (it's from some itch.io pack). So I repurposed the cave sprite, removing the eyes and adding some tracks, and pasting the resource icon, and lo and behold, resource-specific mine icon! It Will Do. But for mines that should be in water (I have a fascination with underwater maps) I need a different icon. So after a bit of googling for ideas, I ended up making something that resembles what I'd say is a medieval oil rig / well, from a useful reference. I find pixel art shading magic, and I shouldn't, as I've done a lot of work on 3D shading for years. But the effect of changing a few pixel colours and getting such a different feel never fails to impress me. Youtube shorts I'm posting short videos on youtube anyway, so I thought why not repurpose for shorts? I had some old code from some tiktokification experiment, which I reused to automatically process a video for usage with shorts. What's even better, is that when uploading to youtube you get an option to copy-paste details from another video, so the process of making the short is really, really easy, so it's a crime not to do that. So that's integrated now, and every youtube video will be accompanied by a short, unless I post something which showcases UI at the right/left edges of the screen, as that's cropped out. Examples of the same video: regular and shorts "New" trailer for PitchYaGame To avoid posting yet again the same exact video that is now 2 years old, and to avoid redoing it from scratch, I just chose a bunch of videos from the last year, chose a second from each, added them altogether with a bit of audio before the beginning of the trailer. Lo and behold, "new" trailer That's all, have a nice weekend!

Double whammy blog posts for the past two weeks. TWO links for the price of ONE post! Un-bee-leaf-able! #gamedev #indiedev #godotengine

byte-arcane.github.i...

byte-arcane.github.i...

13.06.2025 18:34 — 👍 7 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0

Sounds like a DnD shenanigan - attach piece of meat in spear, attack fire elementals with spear, enjoy a good dinner afterwards 😂

13.06.2025 18:15 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Long video warning! Quest to deactivate a portal spawning fire elementals deep in a mine. Featuring: "footstep town", working mine, miners and their ... pets, and bad evil mine level with a portal barfing increasingly stronger fire elementals. You got it all folks! #gamedev #indiedev #godotengine

13.06.2025 18:11 — 👍 28 🔁 7 💬 2 📌 0

I need help 🫠

I was asked to put the animations in a context...

So here's how it looks like with some environment around... The right pigeon hops (old animation) towards the statue & walks (new animation) back.

Which one do you prefer? Old or new? 🤔😬🤷‍♂️

#pixelart #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame

13.06.2025 11:51 — 👍 25 🔁 6 💬 6 📌 0

Hello everyone, this Friday I would like to show you a few sketches from my drawings that I made to improve myself, and I am curious to hear your comments.

Hey #gamedevs! It's #FollowFriday !🍀

#gaming #gamedev #indiegame #STEAM #Trending #fypシ #art #fanart

13.06.2025 11:53 — 👍 43 🔁 6 💬 2 📌 0

A game screenshot showing the player character being surprised by a label showing 3006 Steam wishlists!

A huge THANKS to everybody who has wishlisted Sigil of Kings, based on a promise of a vision of a solodev and an endless, endless array of how-the-sausage-is-made videos and posts, without even a proper demo *yet*

You're AWESOME! 🤩
(and patient)

#gamedev #indiedev #solodev #godotengine

12.06.2025 20:48 — 👍 25 🔁 3 💬 2 📌 1

Much appreciated, thanks!! 😄

12.06.2025 18:57 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Ha, thank you so much! 😄

12.06.2025 18:56 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Love the colours and art overall, awesome!

12.06.2025 15:13 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

Any #indiegamedev #indiedevs out there working on a Wizardry / Might & Magic styled blobber with a custom party and such?

Anyone?

10.06.2025 14:47 — 👍 8 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0

🤣 Thanks for wishlisting and the shoutout!!

12.06.2025 13:00 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Awesome, thank you so much!!!

12.06.2025 12:59 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

It's #TurnBasedThursday! A lot of new features this week including picking torches up off the walls and them going out.

bsky.app/profile/bria...

12.06.2025 12:50 — 👍 13 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

1000 reviews ... 🤩 Congrats!!

12.06.2025 12:56 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Happy #turnbasedthursday everyone and thanks for hosting and all the related work @tresebrothers.bsky.social! For Sigil of Kings, here's the PitchYaGame post as it's a nice quick up-to-date summary bsky.app/profile/byte...

12.06.2025 12:55 — 👍 14 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 0

Byte Arcane making Sigil of Kings

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